This is a notebook of projects I attempt with a Raspberry Pi or wearable technology

About me

In the photo I am in the blue blouse. It's taken on the famous little railway to Shimla. I'm a Code Club volunteer and love messing about with computing and particularly coding in Scratch. I want to get into 'maker' stuff using my Raspberry Pi but I'm a complete newbie. I am learning a bit about electronic making by going to Leeds Raspberry Jam once a month. I'm looking to do a robot project with the Raspberry Pi Zero in the future. I've just started an adventure to code wearable LEDs using an Adafruit Gemma. And I've been lucky to have been given a CodeBug so I'm learning to use that too!

Geek Gran interacts with Minecraft at last!

Over the last few months I’ve been trying to use Python with Minecraft and not succeeding until today.

It was made easier when I bought a microSD card for the Pi Zero. The software is up-to-date so that really helps. With an SD card adapter, I could put the microSD card into our Raspberry Pi model B and I thought I was home and dry.

I am following Carrie Anne Philbin’s instructions in her book ‘Adventures in Raspberry Pi’ or you can look at her Geek Gurl Minecraft video. I just couldn’t get it to work and then read somewhere that you can only use Python2 with Minecraft. That was the answer! I followed her instructions and although when I put cd api/python into LXTerminal it wasn’t happy, when I followed the rest of the instructions my message appeared on the Minecraft game window, so I’ve cracked the interaction part.

By the way, I opened Python2 and used Idle, as a text editor, rather than the editor which she uses in her book. Also, it seems to be important to use a capital letter in ‘Minecraft’ in line 2 of the code but I don’t know why. One useful thing I found was that if I opened my previous Python3 attempts in Python2 they worked, consequently my failures were of some use after all. So that’s as far as I’ve got, but presumably coding other features with Minecraft should be easy now that I’ve learnt to interact with mc!